I was intitially looking for someone to express an interest in what I have to present. I'm not sure if I was being unclear or if no one was really interested; but I've decided to go ahead with what I have to share because surely someone will appreciate it.

As you can see in the above picture, paintings I created have lost their original artwork and have instead become the 'sunset' design.

It can also happen that your photographs lose their pictures too and you're left with a blue image instead.

What can you do about it?

If you have OFB there are now things you can do to ensure that even if a painting or photograph loses its content, you won't necessarily have lost it altogether.

How?

Make backups.

If you have OFB, you can create a small lot, place your photographs and paintings there for sale. I even put a small wall up running the length of the lot. I added two cheap counters, a cash register and a phone.

Total price: around $4000 simoleans.

Distribute your photos/paintings along the wall.... use the price setting tool just to make them all for sale... touch each one to get them highlighted yellow.

Use your sim now to set price of type in the custom mode... type in the price you want them to sell for. Do this once for any paintings and once for any photos you have.

Make sure your business was closed for all this.

You don't want any other sims buying up your pics while your sim is there.

Send that sim home and exit and save that household.

Now you need another sim family to come BUY your photos/paintings.

Activate another family and send them on a shopping spree to buy all the pictures at that lot.

Now you have two families with the same pictures.

You can take this a step further and actually have a sim dedicated to doing nothing more than picking up pictures from little art lots in your neighborhoods to deposit into a central location... a museum if you'd like to call it that.

There are some basic rules you should follow to ensure that you never lose your art.

Paintings are especially touchy to losing their data so I will address this first.

Try always to sell art only in the same neighborhood it was created in. Transporting it from Pleasantview to Downtown, as an example, might appear to work ok, but the next time you load the game you could find that your painting has become a sunset.

If you have transported a copy this isn't such a big deal. If you transported the original you've just wasted a lot of your time for nothing.

Keep your original paintings local and this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

Each of my neighborhoods and subneighborhoods are getting their own central art 'museums'.

Photographs are heartier and should handle being transported, but it is still a better idea to have backups available 'just in case'.

I've had occassions where even after centralising my paintings, I came back to the game again to find I needed to replace some paintings in the museum.

I sent my collecting sim back around to the small art lots and replaced those paintings again. Eventually it settled down and the problem wasn't a problem anymore. The art in the museum was fine after a few times loading the game.

I should point out that even though the art in the museum had lost data, the art in the sims small art lots were fine... so I had the backups I needed.

If you enjoy sim-creating custom artwork for your game this should be a pretty handy way for you to ensure that your artwork is safe.

Not a complete fix; it's just a workaround. It's time consuming. The peace of mind I get from it makes it worthwhile to me.

Vampyre, I contacted EA support about this problem. Some, but not all of my custom paintings were becoming sunsets. In one home, 2 out of 3 had changed. I couldn't figure out why some pictures held their image while others didn't. At first I thought that it was because the sims had moved houses, - but that wasn't consistent- other households that had moved homes with pictures held in their inventories still had the correct pictures. I only had the sims in one neighbourhood, and the pictures had never been put up for sale. However, when I discovered that I had two portraits side by side, one portrait in tact and the other a sunset, in the same house, I contacted EA for help.

EA's standard reply to my query ("Do you have custom content?") helped me make the connection. I pinned it down to having used Eddief66's Turboeasel to make the pictures. Using the mod made the game too easy so I took it out; it took a while for me to realise that removing the mod had caused the pictures to revert to sunsets.

Please note even though Eddie's Turbo Easel is no longer available at MTS2, I am not blaming the mod in any way, the portraits had been intact while the mod was in my Downloads folder; the sunsets only emerged after removing the mod.

I do think you are right about picture and painting data getting lost along the way, especially between different areas within the same neighbourhood (Residential, Commercial, Downtown and Uni). Thanks for the tip on how to work around this issue.

I've noticed losses with paintings AND photographs after installing a patch. The NL patch I think.

I'm still losing painting data... but I have yet to lose one in the home it originated in or at the owning Sim's 'art lot'. I don't claim that this will absolutely prevent the loss from ocuring wth every painting. Paintings created in the University neighborhood are even harder to protect.

Something like a mod or a patch might cause the problem too. I'll be watching in my game to see if it does.

I've heard that Maxis "knows" about the problem. Knowing about it and fixing it are two different things.

The bad news is that I HAVE seen the problem again, even with Pets installed.

I knew I should be skeptical.

I must admit that it took some work to get it to happen, but it did happen.

Don't put paintings in your sims inventory when on a community lot if that sim is a manager on the lot. That's how I broke it. I should also mention that I saved and exited while the sims were still at the community lot. I probably should have sent everyone home first.

I'll post here again with whatever I may find out about this with no Pets installed.

I would suspect that once they addressed the issue it should be OK in the subsequent releases too. Key operatives are SUSPECT and SHOULD.

I just bought a batch o' paintings in one neighborhood and hauled them home to the main neighborhood and when I started the game next time I had four freshly reverted sunset paintings where there had been painstakingly posed and painted still-lifes before.

Particularly if you are doing still lifes( or any painting you want to keep really) this could make your life miserable, so my workaround should give you things to keep in mind.

Play it safe and don't haul paintings you think you can't afford to lose between neighborhoods...make copies where you can.

They might have fixed some of the problem but they sure didn't lick it.-

For anyone wondering what expansions might be affected... I have basegame through Seasons.

I usually create custom paintings from screenshots I took. Put them in the paintings-folder and next time I want one of my simmies to paint a "still-life" I let them do a custom painting. When the window with custom paintigns pops up I just select one of my own converted screenshots.This way, whenever they loose a painting, they can always make the same one again - after I saved it in my paintings-folder I think that's easier than putting all those paitings up for sale...